At first light when the world is still bruised by the night, I look out to see a yew tree dancing in the storm like a black flame.
A friend nearing retirement has worked as a postman for nearly fifty years. He has cataracts and holds each letter close to his face, interposing a magnifying glass as he struggles to decipher addresses as if through a smoke screen. He works more than twelve hours to complete his tasks on most days, even in the deepest frosts and heaviest downpours, and yet his managers seem oblivious of his plight and simply give him even more work in order to improve their own reputations for “efficiency”.
Yesterday I glimpsed a blind man using one of the modern sticks, a straight and slender white cane, five feet or more in length, tipped with a ball. He was finding his way briskly along a busy pavement with a chaotic border of gardens and hedges, holding the cane in his left hand, and a with a young golden Labrador on his right hand straining ahead on its leash.
I mused with some anxiety on how I might survive were blindness to afflict me and thought I might need to go back to my ancient home town in the Cotswolds, where I would arrive already knowing most of its walls and footpaths from childhood. But who would know me ?
